Patrik Schumacher

Education and early career

After high school in Gerlingen, Germany, Patrik Schumacher studied Philosophy and Mathematics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn in the early 1980s. In the mid-eighties Schumacher studied architecture in Stuttgart and in 1987 continued his studies at London Southbank University.

In 1988 – still a student – he joined the design studio of Zaha Hadid, engaged in the design of the Vitra Firestation, the first built project of Zaha Hadid. In 1990 he returned to Stuttgart University to complete his Diploma in Architecture and then re-joined Zaha Hadid. In 1999 he completed his PhD at the Institute of Cultural Science, Klagenfurt University.

Teaching

Schumacher started his teaching career in 1993, teaching a post-graduate diploma course in architecture at Kingston University. He has collaborated with Zaha Hadid to teach advanced architecture studios in the United States, including Columbia University, Harvard's Graduate School of Design, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and between 2002 and 2016 five times at Yale School of Architecture. From 1994 to 1996 Schumacher was assistant professor at the Technical University (TU) Berlin.

In 1996 he founded (with Brett Steele) the Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London where he continues to teach. From 2000 to 2015 he joined Zaha Hadid to lead one of the master classes at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and currently remains an honorary professor there. From 2004 to 2014 he was also University Professor at the Institute for Experimental Design at the University of Innsbruck. In 2013 Schumacher taught a design studio (with Marc Fornes) as the John Portman Chair in Architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Professional career

Since its incorporation in the late 1990s Schumacher served as a director of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) and is credited as partner and co-author of the practice's output. Since Zaha Hadid's death in April 2016 he has been leading the firm as its sole remaining partner.

Theory and Research

Schumacher has been publishing theoretical articles in architectural magazines and anthologies since 1996, arguing for an expanded formal and spatial design repertoire as architecture's response to the new level of societal complexity and dynamism brought on by the socio-economic transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism. Schumacher has prompted controversy by presenting his radical views against social housing, restrictive housing standards and against the whole urban planning system. His views are based on Libertarianism promoting unregulated privatised capitalism in all aspects of architecture, planning and development.For an early exposition see ‘Business - Research – Architecture’, published in Daidalos 69/7, 1999.

Schumacher uses the phrase ‘parametricism’ to denote the use in architecture of advanced computational design techniques. In 2008 he launched a manifesto for ‘Parametricism’ at the Venice Architecture Biennale and a year later published his seminal article ‘Parametricism - A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design’ published in Architectural Design - Digital Cities, Vol 79, No 4, July/August 2009. This article was widely and controversially discussed and remains the most downloaded article in the online archive of this theory-focused architectural journal.

In 2010 Schumacher published the 1st Volume of his self-styled 'opus magnum' ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’ claiming to offer a ‘New Framework for Architecture’, followed by the 2nd Volume subtitled ‘A New Agenda for Architecture’ in 2012.

In writings and lectures Schumacher has announced and advocated his research project of an ‘Agent-based parametric semiology’, positing the idea that the social functionality of the built environment depends on its communicative capacity as a semiologically encoded field that informs and instructs social actors and thereby coordinates social processes. Schumacher refers to this as the ‘semiological project’ and proposes a new form of agent-based crowd modelling which he calls ‘life process modeling’ which purportedly allows for the operationalization of this approach whereby the simulated, frame-dependent crowd behavior represents the meaning and purpose of the design within the design model, thus making it susceptible to successive optimizing improvements.